How Much Money You Need to Earn in Each State to Rent a House, Mapped

In many places across the U.S., the rent is simply too damn high. Average housing prices are rising twice as fast as wages are, and as a result, more and more people are renting. And that's not cheap either—as of 2015, 38 percent of American households were "rent-burdened," meaning spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing.

What does this mean for you? This map from the cost information site How Much, spotted by Thrillist, can tell you. It details what kind of monthly income you need to make in order to rent the average home in each state without spending more than 30 percent of your salary.

The map may confirm what you already suspected: Places like California, New York, Massachusetts, D.C., and Hawaii are very expensive to live in. You might be surprised to learn just how expensive, though. While a renter in Iowa only needs to earn $3500 or so a month to comfortably pay for housing, someone living in Washington, D.C. needs to make almost $8500 a month, or almost $102,000 a year.

How Much

Here's what you need to make each month to live in the top 10 most expensive states in the U.S.:

But before you pack up and move to West Virginia or Mississippi, be aware that those states also have some of the lowest median wages in the U.S., meaning that in reality, housing isn't all that affordable there, either.

There are, to be sure, some weaknesses with this particular data. The map doesn't take into account what kind of home you'd be renting—it just looks at the median price for a rental in each state—nor does it distinguish between locations within states. (The rent in Syracuse, New York is a lot different than the rent in Manhattan, just like the rent in San Francisco is a lot different than the rent in Fresno, California.) But it's still a useful snapshot of our current housing situation.

The Most Popular Viral Video in Each State

Viral videos have been around long enough for some to be considered classics. For the map below, the internet service provider GetCenturyLink rounded up the most iconic YouTube videos from the platform's 13-year history and broke them down by state.

After making a list of the most popular viral videos from the classic YouTube era through today, analysts looked at Google Trends’s YouTube search data to see which videos were being watched the most in which parts of the country. The "Wedding Entrance Dance" video is the viral content with the most widespread appeal, dominating searches in 11 states. "Charlie Bit My Finger", the video on the map with the most overall views at 860 million, topped the list of favorite bits in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, North Carolina, and Texas. Meanwhile "Potter Puppet Pals" is the most beloved viral video in Utah, the state with highest percentage of Harry Potter fans based on how many residents like the Harry Potter Facebook page.

Many of the videos on this map were uploaded prior to 2010, but that doesn't mean the viral video is a fading art form. The YouTube landscape just looks slightly different than it did a decade ago, with ASMR and unboxing videos often topping the trending lists.

Before embarking on a nostalgia-field YouTube binge, check out the map below to find your state's favorite video.

Here's How Daylight Saving Time Affects Your Part of the Country

Daylight saving time was created to benefit Americans, but not every part of the country is affected equally. Within the Eastern time zone, for instance, the sun rises a whole 40 minutes earlier in New York City than it does in Detroit. To illustrate how daylight saving time impacts sunrise and sunset times around the county, cartographer Andy Woodruff published a series of helpful maps on his website.

Below, the map on the left depicts how many days of reasonable sunrise time—defined as 7 a.m. or earlier—each part of the country is getting. The regions in the yellow sections have the most days with early sunrises and the darker parts have the fewest. On the right, the second map shows how many sunsets past 5 p.m. we’re getting each year, which appear to be a lot more abundant

Next, he visualized what these sunrise and sunset times would look like if daylight saving were abolished completely, something many people have been pushing for years. While our sunset times remain pretty much the same, the mornings start to look a lot sunnier for people all over the country, especially in places like West Texas.

And for those of you who were curious, here’s what America would look like if daylight saving time were in effect year-round. While mornings would look miserable pretty much everywhere, there’d at least be plenty of sunshine to enjoy once we got off work.

You can tinker with an interactive version of the daylight saving map on Woodruff’s blog.